Don't look to NAC to reduce costs, according to the Forrester Research report mentioned in the last newsletter.

In the short term, businesses should actually expect costs to rise due to NAC deployment, according to the study by Rob Whiteley, a Forrester analyst.

“In fact, as a network manager, you run the risk of increasing costs by bogging down your network administrators and engineers with additional troubleshooting and configuration requirements,” the study says.

This parallels admissions made by NAC vendors themselves last month at Interop when a panel was asked about the ROI for NAC. According to those speakers, setting up NAC is a slow, methodical process and may in its initial phases require significant work.

That is especially true of networks that lack updated infrastructure to support the form of NAC chosen, they say. The problem is compounded when networks have not been upgraded for awhile and businesses try to deploy NAC that involves network-based enforcement. (Compare NAC products)

When NAC is regarded as necessary, businesses can look to risk management and support for regulatory compliance as justifications, the study says.

NAC costs can be contained, though, via sensible phasing in of the technology. For instance, appliances and software NAC products can be used initially, delaying network-based NAC until the regularly scheduled network refresh, the study says.

Businesses should use vendors whose NAC gear can utilize existing network tools rather than duplicating them. For instance, existing policy severs might be used to store NAC policies rather than duplicating policies on a separate NAC platform, Forrester says.

There’s more in this study, which Forrester sells at online.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.